750 words - day 2 (sorry for being repeato-guy)

Day Two of writing 750 words a day, here we go... Many things happened today. I stuck to my inspiration to bake an Irish soda bread this morning, in honor of the woman from Ireland that I married. I bailed on baking a traditional recipe, mixing the dough by hand and used my bread machine instead. The bread machine recipes always suggest baking with active yeast, even for a traditional recipe that does not require yeast, so the end result is more like a sliceable bread than like a more cake-like bread a traditional Irish soda bread turns out to be. The taste was there, and I did buy a big jar of orange marmalade, fixed a pot of Darjeeling tea and listened to The Chieftains. It was a moment of introspection spent alone with my memories, and with my imaginations. While being consumed with all these thoughts of "her", I combined her into thoughts I developed while listening to Coast To Coast AM the evening before. The guest speaker was someone that became a psychic medium. She was not born a medium the way that most of the successful mediums they have on this talk show have been. So I was intrigued. She began her career path towards becoming a medium as a journalist. She had an interest in documenting paranormal activities and has written several books about her experiences. Then she met a medium that practices these abilities in a "Church of Spiritism/Spiritualism" and things began to change for her. She started to have mediumistic experiences and thru being tutored by other successful and acclaimed mediums, she began to have profound mediumistic, channeling experiences. THIS story, of someone who was not born with these abilities but was able to willingly develop them inspired me to go out on a venture today to try to channel the woman I married. I even went as far as to videotape my meditation/channeling session so that I could speak out loud the things I was seeing and feeling, and not have to worry about remembering them after my trance ended. I don't think I am at the point yet in my development where I can actually pull the presence of a spirit into "my space". I get a more scenic view of where a spirit may be, and what it is they are doing with their new life on the other side. This woman, her name is "Steph" is pulling the presence of spirits right into her immediate space, so closely to her that the voice impressions they impart to her can be spoken through her own living body. In my trance, I was not bold enough to do this, even though I believe that I am capable, and could do it. Maybe tomorrow, later today I'll try again and see what can happen. 

So it feels like I'm not saying anything new in this entry yet today. I already told one of my blog readers everything I've said here so far, and I'm about to go on and talk about something different that I told my other blog reader about... I guess this is okay for now because I'm just trying to get back into the practice of writing writing writing... I looked back through some old blog entries, searching for the key word "concert" to find some of the old concert reviews that I used to write for GroundControlMag back in the early/mid 2000s. Oddly, I don't see as many copies of my reviews there as I thought I had posted. I am pretty sure that I have copies of them all in my Google Drive directory, but they are not sorted by any key words there... it might be a fun project to go through all of those and put them together in a self published book of some type. Never thought of doing that before, so maybe this could turn into a new project. I do know that trying to find my concert reviews by Googling GroundControlMag is not easy to do. That website has never been structured properly for organizing the writing of any of the authors there. Here's another thought too, I think that as this gets to be more fun, writing 750 words a day, that I may come in and write more than this minimum required total. I'll go easy for these first few days though so that I don't over do it and burn out too quickly. If I can do this for a whole month I think I'll feel pretty good about myself. 

Continuing on about 90 minutes after I finished writing THAT above, I looked up some of my earlier writings I did for GroundControlMag, found one in the actual online zine, but it's not got my name attached to it. I know it's my writing though. I don't know if ever having written for those guys was a mistake... I mean they gave me opportunities to have reason to write. The original owners of the blog were genuine and did a lot of work to get me assignments, but when they sold out to their primary writer, he, the new guy did not have as much interest, or influence in being able to get me assignments. He did in the beginning but then he just seemed to not care. I was left to use my own reputation as key to getting into concerts. That was when I started to begin my fade out of the "business". I kept writing album reviews for "him", but then just didn't care anymore. Not even going to mention how I offered to try to take over running the zine, thinking that if I were the "new publisher" my name alone would get me into shows, but no, that didn't happen either. When I scan back thru some of the things I wrote that were considered music reviews (concerts/albums) I was not very good at it. I was not as good as those guys that write for the highly established and successful music zines online. Partly because I'm not a musician, nor do I have a background involved with musicians. I'm just a dude that likes to listen to music and felt like I had a "thing with words", basically trying to describe what I think, or how I feel when I'd write down these thoughts. I never had any training as a journalist or an official writer of any sort. I think it was a sign of the times how anyone could get away with being whatever it was they wanted to be, there were no rules anymore and no one judged your work. I was not working for a professional magazine or newspaper where there would be proofreaders/editors to review your submissions. But to me, getting to walk up to the ticket window at Great American Music Hall and tell the man/woman in the window that "I'm on the guest list for the show tonight", that was a bit of meager prestige that gave me confidence. I had become good enough, by the scruff of my teeth using a camera to document what happened on stage when performers performed, could rush home and edit out my best shots and get them sent in before dawn so people could go online and look for evidence and description of the concert they saw the night before. I just did photography in the beginning, but later told my editors that I also felt qualified as a writer. So they asked for a sample and were impressed enough. The other photographers I was buddying up with could not write at all, so I became a bit more valuable in their estimations. It was a good time. I was happy. I was off my meds. I was productive, and I was doing something that I dreamed of doing when I was 18 years old. It lasted for about 4 or 5 years before it wore me out, and I just kinda faded out of the scene. 

Here's another review from GroundControlMag that I wrote, again, unsigned by name, but I know it's mine. I was there. This is one of my finest reviews.

Here is the collection of concert photos I took over the years.